A cross-cultural study of request speech act: Iraqi and Malay students

Several  studies  have  indicated  that  the  range  and  linguistics  expressions  of  external modifiers  available  in  one  language  differ  from  those  available  in  another  language.  The present study aims to investigate the cross-cultural differences and similarities with regards to  the  realization  of  request  external  modifications.  To  this  end,  30  Iraqi  and  30  Malay university  students  are  selected  as  the  participants  of  this  study.  Spencer-Oatey's  (2008) rapport  management  theoretical  framework  is  used  to  examine  how  face  rapport  is managed through the use of external modifications.  The corpus consists of responses to a Discourse  Completion  Test  (DCT)  consisting  of  eight  situations.  The  questionnaires, adopted  from  Rose  (1994),  were  distributed  among  Iraqi  students  and  Malaysian  Malay students  studying  at  Universiti  Sains  Malaysia,  Malaysia.  The  corpus  was  then  analyzed based on Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s (1989) classification of external modifiers. The primary  objective  of  this  paper  is  to  compare  the  effect  of  situational  factors  on  the realization  patterns  of  request  modification  between  Iraqi  and  Malay  university  students .The findings indicated that grounders are the most common external modifier used by the subjects.  Results  also  show  more  similarities  than  differences  between  the  subjects  under study  in  terms  of  the  use  of  mitigation  devices  such  as  apologies,  compliments  and gratitude.  However,  both  Iraqis  and  Malays  differ  in  their  perception  of  the  situational factors. Finally,  the  study suggests some pedagogical implications  for both ESL and EFL teachers.